Gears of War: Judgment Review - Machismo on a smaller scale

Gears of War: Judgment

It used to be you’d come to Gears of War for the outrageous beefcake machismo and stay for the chainsaw bayonet bloodbaths.

The franchise’s overarching story concerning an Earth-like planet under siege by a horde of pasty, subterranean aliens was mostly disposable. After all, how could one take seriously the narrative of a game in which enemies actually said the word “boom” while firing a weapon called a “boomshot?” We were given just enough drama to provide a bit of purpose to our flesh-rending fun; no more and no less.

Things are a bit different in Gears of War: Judgment.

Penned by a new writing team that includes Tom Bissell — an accomplished scribe known to gamers through his journalism for publications including The New Yorker as well as the book Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter — Epic’s latest testosterone-fuelled adventure has more on its mind than simple grub extermination

After the aftermath

Set 15 years after Judgment and concurrent with the events of Gears of War 3, Aftermath is a satisfyingly lengthy bonus mission unlocked by earning at least 40 stars during the main campaign (something most players will accomplish within just a few hours).

Players again take on the role of Baird, who leads a small squad back into the ruins of Halvo Bay on a mission integral in the fight against both the Locust and the Lambent life forms players battled in the third game.

It lasts a couple of hours and fills in a big narrative gap from the third game, which left many players wondering what Baird and Cole were up to when they disappeared for a long stretch in the middle of the story.

Plus, it contains at least a couple of Easter eggs (that we found) revealing additional information regarding the events and characters of the main story.

It’s a nice little extra, especially considering the brevity of the campaign.

Set years before the first Gears of War game and only a month after the bug-like Locust horde first emerged from the ground to wreak havoc on planet Sera, players take control of Kilo squad, a freshly formed Gears unit led by a newly promoted Lt. Damon Baird, the wisecracking blond who also appeared in the series’ numbered games. Kilo’s escapade takes the squad off-grid to fight an enemy general that’s razing the city of Halvo Bay one building at a time.

The plot has a more sophisticated structure than its forebears. Told through a series of flashbacks at a military tribunal, players take turns controlling all four members of the squad, each of whom relates a segment of their quest in an attempt to prove the group’s actions of disobedience and theft were justified.

It’s a basic, believable study of the all-too-common clash between standard military operating procedures and boots-on-the-ground decision making. The conflict will feel familiar to most, and its outcome is pretty predictable. But the journey to story’s end is not without charm, most of which comes from the members of kilo squad.

Each grunt is given a bit of time under the spotlight to flesh out their backgrounds and personalities. We watch the group’s sole female member, Sofia, transform from bright-eyed recruit to blood-soaked veteran, and we see at least some of the reason why the Baird of later years was such a cynic (and no longer an officer).

But Garron Paduk is the most memorable of the bunch. This heavily accented former soldier of the Union of Independent Republics (the Gears-world equivalent of the Soviet Union) is possessed of a gruff wit and more than a few memorable one-liners. You’ll want to keep the dialogue volume turned up whenever he’s on screen, if only to hear him wistfully wish Sera’s human occupants could “get back to killing each other, like normal people.”

In making a game about a relatively small battle starring a cast of minor and new characters at the outset of a war the resolution of which is already known, Epic Games and its Polish subsidiary People Can Fly were forced into crafting an experience that feels much smaller than those that came before.

The campaign — which takes only seven or eight hours to complete on normal difficulty — lacks the sense of urgency and impending doom found in previous games, as well as any truly grand set piece battles. It’s a series of objectives significant to the here and now but of minor importance to the greater war effort.

However, in place of the epic scope found in previous entries we’re provided with an interesting tweak to level design called “testimonials.” Building off the story’s military trial conceit, most of the campaign’s 50 or so sections can be made more challenging by choosing to hear additional testimonial details from the squad member relating the tale.

For example, Paduk might tell the court that his squad found itself in possession of woefully inappropriate weapons, in which case you may be forced into using long range weapons to combat a horde of Locust charging at close range with meat cleavers. Or you may hear Baird describe how dust from a massive explosion led to poor visibility, resulting in a white haze descending on the battlefield that makes it impossible to see enemies until they’re almost upon you. The challenges are varied, imaginative, and can make things very, very hard.

Your reward for taking on these extra hardships? The potential to earn more stars.

Stars are part of a newly implemented scoring system meant to increase game longevity by coaxing players to return to mission segments to improve their recorded performance — perhaps on a harder difficulty to increase the preciousness of the stars’ metal.

It’s a decidedly game-ish innovation, and a little at odds with the developers’ seeming intent to make Judgment a more story-driven game. Still, it serves its purpose. I replayed several sections of the campaign mid-game simply out of a desire to increase my star rating.

Ode to a ticker

Don’t neglect the lowly Ticker.

When playing as the Locust in Overrun mode, this small, vulnerable bug is my grub of choice. In fact, I’ve earned more points, destroyed more obstacles, and taken out more objectives as a Ticker than any other creature.

Fast and destructive (it can thrash at obstacles with its claws or do a kamikaze run and explode next to an enemy or objective), the Ticker is wee enough to easily hide behind obstructions and can skitter through holes in walls that are too big for everyone else. When working as a team they can take down any barrier or objective in a matter of seconds.

So at the start of your next Overrun match say to your comrades: “Everyone! Tickers left!” Working as a group, you may well decimate the Gears’ defences before they even know what hit them.

Judgment‘s competitive play, meanwhile, lacks some of the distinctive personality found in previous Gears games.

In the few hours I’ve spent playing basic Free-for-All, Team Free-for-All, and Domination matches, I was struck by how most matches quickly descended into a simple battle of reflexes as players leap-dodged around each other until they could get close enough to disintegrate someone with a single blast from a gnasher shotgun.

And gone is the series’ popular, camaraderie-building Horde mode. It seems to have been replaced by a more rudimentary mode dubbed Survival that has players defending an objective from ten incoming waves of Locust. I lost interest after only a few matches.

That left me to invest the bulk of my online time in the new Overrun mode, the undeniable star of Judgment‘s competitive offerings.

An agreeable blend of chaos and strategy, Overrun is a team-centric game type that pits Gears — whose job is to defend locked Locust emergence holes and power generators — against swarms of attacking grubs, with players given a chance to play multiple roles on each side over the course of a match.

Playing a human grunt, medic, engineer, or scout is fun, but this mode really comes into its own when you don the carapaces of eight different Locust specimens. They range from wretches and suicidal tickers (see sidebar) to the much larger and shockingly powerful maulers and corpsers, which only become available once you’ve earned enough points playing as lower classes.

It’s also a great generator of memorable group moments. Two of mine so far involved crushing a trio of Gears simultaneously with one blow of a corpser’s giant claws and standing my ground behind barriers with a squad of buddies, desperately fending off a last ditch barrage of Locust from scoring a hit on our dying, sputtering generator as the final seconds of the clock wound down.

Suffice to say Overrun is where I plan to spend just about all of my time with Judgment‘s multiplayer from here on out.

Gears of War: Judgment is clearly the work of talented gamesmiths. It has the most lucid, well-constructed tale of any Gears game yet, and its cover-based action — which has been lightly tweaked to make for slightly faster-paced play (you now pick up ammo dropped by enemies automatically rather than stopping to press a button) — has never been tighter.

But it’s also a minor entry in a major series. A footnote in a story that’s already been told. An artificial extension of a series made to fill the tail-end void created by a console cycle stretched too long and too thin.

Franchise fans will have some fun here, no doubt. I’m one of them. But I’m also more interested in seeing what Epic has been prepping for the next-generation. Whether its a new Gears game or something else entirely, I can’t help but think it will do better justice to the studio’s vainglorious moniker than Judgment.

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